One month exactly since Christmas. Isn’t that crazy? Eleven to go! Hippity hop!

No significant report for today. I made my second trek to the post office this morning, trying to beat the crowd. And I reckon I did, because I didn’t see a soul I knew for maybe the first time ever. Got justifiably aggravated by the Yankee receptionist at the clinic, as she persistently tried to get me to come in for blood work tomorrow morning. Evidently declining politely doesn’t work with her type. You have to yell, in the middle of the aforementioned post office no less, “NO, BETTY, I WOULD NOT LIKE TO COME IN FIRST THING TOMORROW!!!”

People give you a wider berth when you get a touch frustrated in public like that, which is also fine by me.

I was already in a bad mood because I had to endure sniffling Jake all day, as I tried to eat my eggs over easy, as I attempted to work on the Annual Report, as I tried and failed to compose a thoughtful card to my dear friend in Texas. Cough, cough, cough, sniff, sniff, SNIIIIFFF. Meanwhile, I’m gag-gag-gagging. Plus, did I mention, I had to go to the dentist? Just one irritation after another. All the livelong day. I won’t even mention the psychos on the commute home. 60 mile an hour tailgater, darting in and out of traffic, getting a whole three cars ahead of me before making a turn that brought us all to stand on our noses. NICE.

Barry the Chigger sent me some more prompts today. Which, let me remind you, you are ALL free to do. The one that’s sticking with me is “your first rodeo/ circus”

It’s amusing he thinks I can remember my first rodeo. I’m not Forrest Gump. I feel sure I was at a rodeo before I was out of diapers, but I can definitely regale you with a few stories that came after I was out of short pants.

My Most Huggable Cousin and her boyfriend took me to one at Thompson Bowling Arena when I was in high school. I don’t remember why she deigned to let me go on one of their sacred date nights, but she did. I also can’t fathom why I even wanted to go, as I detested her boyfriend like the Queen hated Camilla. If memory serves, it was a PBR event, not a true rodeo. And I know for a fact the Dixie Chicks were there at intermission. You know, before they tried to become politically correct and dropped the Dixie. This was also before they hit it big and said all the nasty things about our country while touring France. Anyway, they were so incredibly bad that people were walking out on them.

That’s the first of many rodeos that left an indelible memory.

There would be hundreds more, from Pensacola, Florida, where I acquired one of the top ten worst sunburns of my life and quit my job to do it, to Sisters, Oregon, where I watched the original One-Armed Bandit drive three buffalo on top of his stock trailer in the middle of the arena.

There were many nights spent in an unyielding plastic airport chair, the armrests digging into my rib cage—seems like it was always Salt Lake where we got stuck. There were a few nights curled into a ball in the backseat of a rental car, on some highway between Here and There. There was the time we rode out a tornado in the Lance slide-in camper underneath a magnolia tree in Rome, Georgia. I’ve been to plenty of places where I couldn’t pronounce the name of the town when we pulled in, and still couldn’t when we pulled out. There was Rodeo De Santa Fe, where I seen Joe Beaver three sheets to the wind and a Rodeo Queen fall off her horse in the Grand Entry, and she appeared to be sober as a judge. No place better for it to happen, either. That’s the snottiest city I ever set foot in.

There was Cody, Wyoming, where they rodeo every night, and I saw Chris LeDoux’s son right regular. The ones in Kansas, as common as wheat chaff, and equally as forgettable, with the tall, silent cowboys. Nebraska, cold and dry nights with the crystalline air cutting through the thickest Carhartt, my knuckles pressed against Hot Hands packets shoved deep in my pockets.

I met so many people, so many families with little wannabe cowboys, growing up with a feather in their hat. Dave always had a word of encouragement for them, because — believe it or not— there are worse things to grow up and be than a cowboy.

It’s a lonely life, because nobody wants to stay, waking up looking at the road every day, maybe the gas in the tank the only thing left from the last paycheck, the looming possibility of getting really hurt and then what? Greasy cheeseburgers, greasy hair, no time to waste, gotta push to get there. Always dusty, it didn’t matter if it was inside, outside, or under cover. The bulls were traditionally sweet behind the chutes, and the broncs rangy and temperamental. But mainly, I remember the late nights, the clanging of the gates as the cowboys rode slack, after the crowds cleared out and went back to their three bedroom houses in subdivisions and their lives devoid of cow manure and broken ropes and busted dreams. But maybe they dreamed of this life, his freedom from mortgages and analytical spreadsheets and figuring out how to finance a week at the beach. Maybe this night at the county fairgrounds was as close to free as they’d ever get to be.

It was wonderful, but it was only for a season. So that’s why I can be nostalgic about it. It’s been a long time since my first rodeo, but it’s like anything else horse related: it bites and it never lets go. Garth Brooks got it right once: “the white line’s getting longer, and the saddle’s gettin’ cold, and I’m much too young to feel this damn old.”

Gotta go, gotta go, gotta rodeo.

Love from Appalachia and all the miles in between,

~Amy